by Manda Scott
‘I understand completely.’ There is a pause, another decision weighed and made. ‘Regrettably, my predecessor chose to have the details classified and so, on this, too, I am not at liberty to divulge the precise nature of Lakoff’s injuries. Were I to do so, however, you might widen the scope of your case.’
Oh, clever woman. ‘Thank you. You’ve been more than helpful. I may be in touch later.’
‘Surely. Anything, anytime. We’re here to serve.’
Theodora Sutherland visits Paul Rey … And Sophie Destivelle is not the first one to have her throat cut and her tongue taken out. Clarions are sounding in Picaut’s mind. Throwing herself back in the chair, she makes two calls.
To Petit-Evard, she says: ‘Check the passenger manifests of all inbound flights from the US: you’re looking for Elodie Duval and Sophie Destivelle in any of her aliases. Include Theodora Sutherland and all variations thereof.’
To Sylvie: ‘We need to find where she lived because it clearly wasn’t that apartment. Look particularly for a cabin near Saint-Cybard.’
To Rollo, who is no longer sitting on the edge of her desk: ‘You can stop looking for Lakoff’s name in the facility records. John Lakoff was there until just over eighteen months ago. Instead, see if you can get me the name and the phone number of whoever was in charge of the Bide-A-Wee rest home for Ageing Spooks before Kochanek took over. Sophie Destivelle was not the first in this series of killings. I want Pierre Fayette to be the last.’
17.45
Half an hour after her phone calls, Picaut gathers her team together and with them come answers to some of her questions.
Petit-Evard hits pay dirt first with news that ‘Theodora and Amélie Sutherland’ flew into Charles de Gaulle airport last night, arriving shortly before nine o’clock. The passport photographs show a mother and daughter, both dark haired, active, cheerful. Assuming that they both know how to put on a wig, they could easily be the two in Elodie’s Mazda MX-5.
‘Bingo. Give that man a week’s leave. Not till the case is over, mind you.’ Petit-Evard glows.
The rest of the debrief is put on hold when Kathryn Kochanek sends the CCTV from Paul Rey’s room through to Picaut’s laptop. The team huddles round her desk to watch.
From the start, it’s clear the CIA rest-home has a good, high-resolution camera which is filming continuously. This is not the jerky stop-start of intermittent CCTV shots generated in most of the world’s larger municipal areas. This footage is well funded and shot with a view to archiving the result.
And so here is a room: clean and homely, with a view from a high window over a meadow with woodland beyond. The weather is good. Trees sway with airy decorum.
The camera makes a lazy swing and here is a bed, a white cabinet laden with flowers, cards stacked in military lines: Pierre Fayette would approve. A uniformed nurse swabs the mouth of the man on the bed and, as she rises to answer a call out of shot, Picaut and her team are given their first clear view of Paul Rey.
Some people look relatively well as they near death. Paul Rey does not. Toothless, bald, with skin that is more liver spot than clear, he has the fallen cheeks and yellowing complexion of end-stage metabolic failure. His eye sockets are sunken pools, barely alive. Still, he brightens as a door opens and, yes, here is a slim, slight, elfin-faced woman, with rust-red hair that shines in the sanitized light: here is Elodie Duval. It is good to see her alive.
She moves fast, with a self-assurance that speaks of many previous visits, and she is weeping as she reaches the bed. She speaks a word, a syllable: his name. Paul Rey lifts a skeletal hand and they embrace, carefully, as if she might break him. She sits at his side and they turn together to watch a woman hesitate in the doorway.
Alive, Sophie Destivelle has a translucent quality, as if light might pass through her undimmed. Her hair is crystalline white. Her eyes are black, still a-spark with a fire of surprising strength in one her age.
Smiling, Paul Rey calls her in. As Kochanek noted, they are at ease in each other’s company in a way that speaks of old, old intimacies. Watching them, though, Picaut sees something else, deeper: an ancient electricity that lights them up.
René Vivier said that they had all loved her, yet none of them had trusted her. In Paul Rey’s case, at least, the former is certainly true and his love, it seems, is matched. On the CCTV feed, Sophie Destivelle speaks his name and the tenderness, the sharp edge of grief, the rage at a life ending, are all in the shape of that one unheard word.
She sits at the bedside opposite Elodie and says something Picaut cannot see, and, because there is no sound, cannot hear. As the segment ends, the camera pans slowly back to the view of the window.
‘That’s her,’ says Martin Gillard, who seems to have attached himself to the group. ‘That’s Sophie Destivelle.’
‘Obviously.’ Picaut leans back in her chair. ‘Why, though?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why is she there? Why is she calling herself Theodora Sutherland? And why has she been doing so for nearly two years?’
An email from Kathryn Kochanek says that Mrs Sutherland has been a frequent visitor for the past eighteen months. Her first visit was on the day that Assistant Director John Lakoff died.
Picaut says, ‘Rollo, any luck with finding the earlier manager of the care home?’
‘He’s dead.’ He sways back from her look. ‘I don’t think you can blame this on anyone else. He had laryngeal carcinoma. Secondaries got him six months ago.’
‘For real?’
‘He’s CIA. They have proper pathologists and they will have checked. So yes, I think we can say it’s for real.’
‘OK. So Sophie and Elodie knew Paul Rey – and each other – well enough to be at his bedside when he died. Look at the way they are with each other. These relationships go beyond one day spent filming.’ Picaut chews on her knuckle. ‘I need to know more about John Lakoff. Rollo, can you get anything?’
‘I can try.’
‘The rest of you, whatever you were doing, put finding Elodie Duval at the top of your list.’
They filter out, all except Martin Gillard, who is not hers to command. He fiddles with objects on her borrowed desk; straightens the phone, puts a pen into line, the music box and the note that came with it. He picks up the paper and holds it so Picaut can read the lower half.
In quiet moments over the past hour, Picaut has sniffed the paper and pressed it to the kettle, but there is no evidence that it contains any wartime ciphers. She says, ‘I’ve never heard anyone say “blythe spirit” before.’
‘I was thinking that. Amongst other things.’ Gillard is silent a while. He raps a knuckle on the music box. ‘Elodie had one just like this. I don’t know where it is, though.’
Laurence Vaughan-Thomas’s music box is the single most beautiful object on which Picaut has ever laid hands. The walnut is so dark as to be virtually black; the inlaid initials are silver-pale ash scrolling across the lid: LVT MdM. She smoothes her palm across the surface, feels the wood silky soft, resonant, almost. Whoever made this had a level of skill beyond ordinary mortals, and a great deal of time. She lifts the lid and listens to the first few bars of ‘God Save the Queen’ play in slurred, unwound dissonance.
‘Did Elodie’s box play the “Marseillaise”?’
‘It did not. For reasons I never understood, it played “Scotland the Brave”.’
He’s not about to go away. Picaut sets the box down. ‘You went to Saint-Cybard when Elodie filmed Sophie. Were you in the room when she filmed her?’
‘No, but Elodie talked about Sophie on the way down. I was listening.’ He doesn’t say he was in the car, which is interesting. Picaut wants to ask more about the box, but she’s getting to know this man, and there’s something he’s trying to tell her.
She waits. After a while, he says, ‘Sophie Destivelle was a double agent, run by both Max Kramme and the British. She was infiltrated into the Maquis de Morez and each side thought they owned her.’
> ‘Which one was right?’
‘That’s the thing. Elodie didn’t know. She interviewed René and JJ and they were adamant that she did not betray any of their inner circle in the months leading up to D-Day, or at least, if she did, Kramme didn’t act on it. But that’s the thing, we’re dealing with very subtle men.’
‘René told me she killed Boche with alacrity.’
‘That’s true, too. JJ said the same thing, that she hated the Germans. She went on four raids with them altogether and she was their expert for opening locks, a demon with the explosives and the best shot they’d got. They didn’t question her at first. But then … she grew very close to Kramme, like, seriously close. Nobody knew if she was doing it so she could destroy him, or if she really did fall in love with him.’
‘She hated Germans – is it likely she’d fall in love with one of them?’
‘He was charming, intelligent and capable of great generosity. It’s not impossible.’
‘What did Elodie think?’
‘She said there was no reason both couldn’t be true: that she was intent on destroying him, and she nonetheless fell in love with him.’ He gives a small, defensive smile. ‘She’s a woman. I am not going to argue with her assessment of this situation.’
‘Would Elodie’s knowing this be enough to put her life in danger, do you think?’
‘Only if something new came up.’ He spreads his hands in a way that opens a world of possibility. ‘That’s what you need to understand; it’s why Clinton is so nervous and keeps thinking you’re going to shut him down. It’s why Elodie hired me in the first place. In making the movie, we’re turning over stones that have been left where they fell at the end of the war. We could have triggered all sorts of things without knowing it and some of them, frankly, would have been better left undisturbed.’
‘Laurence said as much earlier today.’ Picaut is growing a faint, but threatening, headache. ‘You think I should watch the movie McKinney is making?’ she asks.
Martin Gillard shrugs. ‘There’s nothing to watch yet, just hours of raw video. In any case, we’re not the right people to recognize the things that might trigger old wounds. We need Laurence or René or JJ, or someone else from the old days. If they’re alive when we find them, we need to start asking those kinds of questions.’
She is growing to like this man. He feels honest but there is, of course, no reason why he, too, can’t be playing both sides against the middle.
She turns her attention back to Laurence’s box. Opened, the lid hinges widely: she lays it back flat and lifts out the lavender basket, revealing the brass mechanism inside, winding down on the last of its notes.
‘The key’s underneath, clipped into place. There’s a slot for the rewind.’ Gillard hasn’t taken the hint and left yet. Turning the whole thing over, Picaut feels the metal shift slightly. In a lesser box, this might be an accident or an artefact, but nothing in this is a hair’s breadth out of place. Turning it upright again, she takes hold of the sides, shifts them left and right, and yes, the entire mechanism lifts out, and underneath it—
‘My God.’
AND THUS BY ACCIDENT WE BECAME AS GODS
BLYTHE CHILDREN OF THE MOUNTAIN
WARRIORS OF VENGEANCE
UNFORGIVING, UNFORGIVEN
UNFORGOTTEN
‘Christ …’ Gillard takes a step back. His eyes flare wide, showing white at the margins. He lifts his hands, as if warding her off. ‘I had no idea. I’ve never been allowed to touch it. I swear to you I did not know this was here.’
‘But you led me to it.’
‘I was reading the note. I’m not pushing you somewhere I know. I’m following. You have to believe me.’
… find Elodie’s music box and search within it. Blythe spirit, LVT
Picaut says, ‘You’re sure the box you saw was Elodie’s?’
‘It was here, on her desk.’ He lays his hand flat, by the phone, showing the place. ‘It was the inverse of this: pale wood with an ebony inlay.’
‘When did you last see it?’
‘A week ago? Ten days?’ He closes his eyes the better to think. ‘It was definitely here right before she left for the US.’
‘Right.’ Picaut writes herself a three-line note and when she looks up Martin Gillard is leaning over so he can read it. She says, ‘Thank you. I’ll let you know if we get anywhere.’
He plants his thumbs on the desk and doesn’t budge. ‘The poem code,’ he says. ‘The one they used in the war. The first line of any message listed which line numbers and words they were using. As long as London knew the poem, they could decode it.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘Elodie’s note – the one in the alarm clock – the bit she highlighted was a sequence of numbers. We just have to work out what poem she was using.’
‘I have a cryptologist working on it, but if it’s “Céline’s Poem” and that was made up, we stand no chance at all of working it out. Unless you know about Céline and her poem?’
‘Nobody ever mentioned anything like that to me.’
‘Then we’re stuck. I’ll let you know if anything moves. Thank you.’
The note flips in the breeze as he throws the door shut. Blythe spirit.
Her fingers smooth over the lettering inside the music box. Blythe children of the mountain. So beautiful, so raw, so much time taken to shape each letter, and yet … as she smoothes her fingers over, again and again, there’s a step here: a hairline indentation along one of the letters.
Her left hand senses it, the burned one, where the skin still feels sandpapered in places and her sense of touch is either too fine or too dull, with no mellow ground between. Like she did with her face, she nags at it, presses, pushes.
Her mind is on her list. Unthinking, she continues to press, running her finger up and down the indentation … which becomes, in time, a groove.
And so she looks. The ‘I’ of CHILDREN is a channel in the wood, and try though she might, she cannot undo what she has done. She hunts for other letters she can press but does not find them, until she closes her eyes and lets the fingers of her left hand stray as they did before, and yes, here is another hairline anomaly – not even a crack, just an unsmoothness in the otherwise silken surface of the wood – that, as she nags at it, becomes an indentation. And then another, and another. Ten letters have become indented by the time she has finished: IOUASCOTCH.
As she presses the last H, wood slides on wood, a hiss of silken surfaces. A drawer opens that covers the entire base of the box, three centimetres high, by forty across, by thirty deep.
Inside is an envelope, and inside the envelope are three prints, two in black and white, the third in early, unsubtle colour. Written on the outside in a strong, bold hand:
2 June 1944: Two Royal Navy mini-submarines set sail for Normandy to guide Allied landing at Juno and Sword beaches. Warships depart Scapa Flow, Belfast and the Clyde.
SOE, F-Section: All networks given notice that the invasion will begin within the next few days.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SAINT-CYBARD
2 June 1944
‘ICI LONDRES. ECOUTER bien: La grand-mère dit aux cousins qu’ils sont forts. Chocolat meilleur goûte consommé sous les pins, Jean a un …’
Sophie and Max Kramme are in the private dining room of the Hôtel Cinqfeuilles with Luce Moreau, Rudi Schäfer and François Duval. This one night, everyone is inside listening to the BBC and nobody is pretending otherwise.
Kramme makes sharp remarks about Churchill, but when the French notices come on, he is silent. Halfway through the first sentence, he reaches out for Sophie’s hand.
His touch is familiar now. She reaches to meet him, hand to hand, eye to eye. He says, ‘Chocolate tastes better eaten beneath the pines. This is it. This is their first notice of the invasion.’ He is certain. He has contacts in Paris who are running at least two radio sets as if their agents were still alive, whole, unbroken. And he has broken enough men her
e in Saint-Cybard to know the code.
And so the chocolate tastes better and there is no doubt that the Allies are coming. Not today, probably not tomorrow, but sometime in the next week, the landing craft will power across the Channel and pour their many thousands of men onto French soil. Sophie bites her lip. A part of her cheers. A part of her – the one she shows to Kramme – does not.
He says, ‘It’s a feint: we know this. But it will be big, because they want us to believe it.’
‘Are you going to go to Berlin?’ Even to herself, she sounds strained.
‘No. Don’t worry.’ He pats her shoulder. ‘We are asked to keep the supply lines open. Later, maybe, when they launch the real assault on Holland, we may have to go to help with the mopping up.’ His thumb runs down the back of her hand, tracing the hollows between the tendons, and then the length of her finger. ‘It is nearly over and you have been all I could ask. Nearly all.’
He smiles. Behind him, Luce Moreau’s eyes shine with pure loathing. Kramme was hers until the kleine Krankenschwester came along. Now, Luce is left with Rudi Schäfer, the albino SD officer, who is considerably less alluring. The Patron is, as ever, bereft of female company, but he’s laughing with Schäfer as if the prospect of an Allied landing is a good joke, with the punchline worth the waiting.
Sophie does not meet his eyes. This is the way it is, the way it has been, the way it has to be: she is Kramme’s; everyone knows it. They have not slept together yet, but she is no longer entirely clear why not. She has made her pursuit of him so true, so utterly compelling, that her body has come to believe it. He is diffident, which in its own way is frustrating. He has only ever kissed her hand.
He draws her in now, her hand entwined with his. He strokes her hair, runs the length of it between thumb and finger, then her scarf, so that the back of his hand brushes lightly over her breast. ‘When is the raid on the train station?’ He asks his question softly, fondly, so that the others, if they choose to look on, will think they speak of love, perhaps of a future together. She has met his infant son, has commented on how he has his father’s eyes. She has told him about the raid, because she could not do otherwise. Smiling, she answers, ‘Tomorrow night.’